But the conception of Oyster stemmed from one experience Seidman and his brother, Elie, had in 2007 after booking what they thought would be a nice hotel for a trip to Alaska.

From Oyster’s “How We Got Started” page:

They booked a hotel through one of the big online booking sites. Based on the information they had found online, it had seemed like a fine choice. One look at the actual place, however, perfectly illustrated the dangers of relying on the Internet for travel plans. Online, it looked great. In person, it was a dump.

“We assumed, having this problem, that it must have been a lack of research on our part,” Elie Seidman told seattlepi.com.

As it turned out, they just couldn’t find an objective review, he said.

What differentiates Oyster from most of the others is that doesn’t simply regurgitate a hotel’s own marketing description, as many other sites do, Elie Seidman said. Plus, Oyster doesn’t try to sell you hotel rooms at the same time.

“We feel that the voice that’s critically missing is that professional voice,” he said.

The company has a base of 13 reporters who travel the world and review hotels (not a bad gig, if you ask me). They travel on Oyster’s dime to review hotels comparatively – “apples to apples,” Elie Seidman said.

“What’s interesting about the Internet and the Web, is it’s a very democratic environment,” he said. “If you build it and it’s valuable, people will look at it.”

Eventually, the start-up will be funded by advertising revenue. As of Wednesday, there were no ads on the site.

Oyster Hotel Reviews certainly is set to expand. Already, the company has had hotels inviting them down for reviews.

And that’s what Oyster needs: more content.

From the Web site:

Eytan and Andy were working for Microsoft’s Internet search business to increase the relevance of its results. They therefore understood the technical side of the problem of finding hotel information on the Web. Elie had a simple question for Eytan and Andy: “Isn’t the problem I’m having a search problem?” Eytan responded with a simple truth: “Search can’t provide the answer if the underlying content doesn’t exist.”